Entrepreneurship and innovation in what I call “Chilecon Valley”
is being talked about continually here. In my next
post I’ll share a longer description of my
impressions. But to give you a sense of how fast they are
moving, it’s only been a week since I posted the syllabus for our
new Stanford entrepreneurship class Engr245 (The Lean Launchpad.) This week
the class has been adopted in the Computer Science department
of the Catholic University of Chile. (Thanks to Professors
Professor Felix Halcartegaray Vergara and Rosa Alarcon who
will be teaching the class.)

Here’s the course announcement from Professor Vergara (in
English):

Customer Development Course in Chile – Lean
Launchpad

Next semester on the Department of Computer Science of the
Catholic University of Chile professor Rosa Alarcón (@ruyalarcon) and I (@felixcl) will be teaching a course based on the
Customer Development Model developed by Steve Blank. The
objective of this course is that groups of students finish
with a completed software product that has real customers and an
identified market. The idea of this course started on a trip to
Stanford University during March 2010, where we realized that
many of the great innovations in Silicon Valley are born from
Computer Science students, so we said “We should give our
computer science students an opportunity to develop a company”.
Then we saw the great alignment between the Customer Development
Model and the Agile software development methodologies so we
decided to create the course IIC3515 “Workshop of
Entrepreneurship with Software” that applies both models to
develop real software products with customers from the startup
ideas of the students.

A few weeks ago, it was great to see that professor Steve Blank
was developing a very similar course in Stanford called ”The
Lean Launchpad” (Engr245) that combines the customer
development model with agile development with the business model
canvas, and therefore we convinced ourserlves that we where not
so crazy with this course, or at least we are as crazy as they
are. The syllabus for the Stanford course can be
seen here. This course brings to
life in a very interesting way the idea we had with professor
Rosa Alarcón, and it starts on January 2011 so when Steve Blank
was visiting Chile this week, we told him about our course, and
he offered all his help and experience to help us, and so we are
very grateful to him. Therefore we will leverage the experience
in Stanford giving the course on January and February to have a
very interesting proposal to our students on March when we
start. The syllabus for our course (in Spanish) is
here: Programa de curso IIC3515. In
this blog post I will add more information about the development
of this course when I have it. We are very excited on this
project, and we think it will have an important impact on our
university and our students so thank you very much Steve for
making this happen.

The goal of course IIC3515 is that students get together in
teams (probably of 4) and develop their business idea during the
semester, developing the software that represents it. Unlike
other courses on entrepreneurship, this one is NOT about
developing a Business Plan (in fact, the idea is that they write
little and spend the time programming and getting out of the
building to talk to customers.) The students must develop
their initial hypothesis of who their customers are and what is
their products (using the Business Model Canvas) , and then get
out to test this Hypothesis and pivot as they start knowing their
customers and “getting smarter about them”.

With this methodology, once they finish the course they will have
very important tools to continue developing their startup, and
they will also have a product that they will feel confident about
that there are customers that want to buy it, unlike what usually
happens when the development of the product is completed and then
you go out to the market to see if any customer wants it. In this
case, the customer will be considered since the first
moment, and this results in a much more controlled market
risk for the venture. The idea is also to have investors on
the final stages of the course, and have mentors for the students
that have real world experience in startups to support the
students with their projects.

We look forward to your comments and suggestions! Any updates on
this course in english will have the tag “Lean Launchpad course”
to make it easier to search.